The Taste Vacations team recently returned from their annual planning meeting with our sister company, Zephyr Adventures, in beautiful Red Lodge, Montana. Taste Vacations is a 100% virtual company, meaning all of our employees are scattered across the country working from various home office locations. We gathered for a productive week of work, fun, and of course, delicious food and drink while staying in a newly renovated historic home located in the heart of the adorable mountain town. During our time together, we engaged in a beer tasting dinner and tortilla-making demonstration at a local taco joint called, Mas Taco, and had fun testing our wine knowledge with a blind wine tasting. On our last night together, we arranged for Chef Chris Lockhart, of the soon-to-be-opening Ox Pasture, to prepare a magnificent private dinner.
We enjoyed observing an
d chatting with Chris, and his lovely wife Gina, while he prepared our delicious multi-course meal. He utilized a variety of interesting cooking techniques, including sous-vide, where he placed beets in vacuum-sealed plastic bags and submerged them into a temperature-controlled water bath. Sous-vide is a very useful technique because it gives the chef a very high level of control over the texture of the finished dish while eliminating any chance of over- or undercooking it. It is typically used for meat or fish, but Chris expertly utilized this method with the delicious beets that were used in a few of the dishes, including the delightfully pink goat cheese and beet balls featured above. The meal and the company who shared it made for a satisfying and amusing evening.
We left our annual meeting happy, well-fed, and energized for the year to come.
